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3 Ways to Optimize Landing Page Layouts

You’ve got no time to waste when a visitor hits a relevant landing page. If you’ve set things up well, that visitor got there through interest in a keyword, and now you have their attention — that’s valuable. It’s time to get to the point, state your value proposition, and facilitate a conversion.

The problem is: we’re talking about people here. People are impatient, distrustful, and distracted. When you bear that in mind, you can battle those tendencies with key decisions in your landing page layout.

Fight Impatience with Scannability

It’s an unfortunate truth that, no matter how hard you work to carefully craft your copy, the vast majority of visitors simply aren’t going to read it. The visitors are scouring the web for information, and an internet full of near-useless content has taught us all to expect little value. On a landing page, that truth gets amplified.

Greater focus is given to words in the top and left side of the page. Text is scanned in what’s called an f-pattern.

Before a visitor leaves, they’ll read—at most—28% of the words on a page.

If you need more than a couple of short paragraphs of text on your landing page, make sure the first words in those paragraphs give an idea of what they’re about. If you can divide the content into groups, do so! Make sure you write clear, concise headings to help scanning eyes find the information they’re searching for.

Fight Distrust with Facts

Incredibly, our brains have learned to cope with that near-useless content by identifying marketese. We know it’s unhelpful, and won’t get our questions answered. So, we scan the entire page, seeking the information we came for.

You can change that scanning into reading with facts—that’s what the visitor came for, anyway! Aside from getting rid of unnecessary copy, you can take advantage of this fact-seeking by making them stand out: use numbers. Our scanning eyes are attracted to numbers because they usually represent facts. As long as the numbers shared are relevant, you’ll convert that “scanner” into a reader that’s intrigued by what you have to offer.

Intrigue is exactly what you need to turn visitors into leads.

Fight Distraction with a Call to Action

I’m proud of my catchy, rhyming phrase, but I hope it helps you remember one of the main functions of a call to action: offering a painless exchange of value before distraction takes hold. You’ve drawn them in with great writing and helpful facts after they’ve scanned for exactly that—don’t lose your momentum now with a hard-to-locate call to action!

Consider different potential placements, and consider testing to find out what works best. You could have multiple instances of a simple action, either with the same language or with words tailored to the content that was likely read immediately before. You may also find value in offering different actions based on the context. It depends on what information you need from them, but intrigued visitors have been primed for more content, and you’ve got a great opportunity to give it to them in that moment. Or, if you’ve really nailed it, they might be ready to talk to a salesperson to get more of these helpful facts.

Use what you know about scanning and f-shaped reading patterns to ensure calls to action are right where that visitor wants to look for them.

You can fight users’ undesirable tendencies with forethought and these research-backed design principles. Don’t let anything get in the way of your visitors becoming leads.